1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a microchip LC or a microchip electrophoresis performed in a microfabricated microfluidic device (microchip).
The present invention relates to a method for cleaning a microchip after use and a cleaning liquid.
2. Disclosure of the Related Art
Assays utilizing characteristic gene sequences tend to increase year by year. Particularly, there is a strong demand to simply, quickly, and cheaply perform genotyping such as analysis of single or multiplex PCR products, restriction enzyme digests obtained by PCR-RFLP, or SNPs, study of PCR reaction conditions, or analysis of reaction liquids after real-time PCR measurement.
For responding such a demand, microchip electrophoresis is becoming a very suitable method instead of agarose gel electrophoresis. Microchip electrophoresis is particularly characterized in that separation/detection time is as very short as 1 to 2 minutes, high-accuracy separation for identification impossible for agarose gel electrophoresis can be achieved, and numerical data can be displayed and stored. Further, if a reaction liquid in a PCR plate can be directly set in an apparatus without being purified or diluted, operability is greatly improved.
However, a microfabricated microchip (for example, Patent Document 1: JP 2005-214710 A) is expensive, and therefore reuse is more preferable than disposal from the viewpoint of running cost.
As a method for cleaning a microchip for reuse, a method is performed in which reservoirs and channels of the microchip are cleaned every time the electrophoresis of a sample is finished to remove a running buffer, a separation medium, the sample, etc (for example, Non-Patent Document 1: Microchip Electrophoresis System for DNA/RNA Analysis, MCE-202 MultiNA, Instruction Manual, —Instrument and System—, January 2008, The fourth chapter, pp. 17-20, by SHIMADZU CORPORATION).